Initial Details of New POWER PARALLEL Systems

San Francisco, CA, (UniForum'94, Booth 1549 - March 23, 1994) . . . IBM today revealed initial details of new POWERparallel systems* -- scalable, high performance parallel processing information systems built upon IBM's RISC System/6000* processor and AIX/6000* technology.

Blending the best attributes of workstations and high performance computers, the POWERparallel systems will scale, or grow, from four to 128 nodes, and offer wide and thin node combinations, POWER* and POWER2* processor choices, immense storage capacity and increased network and disk connectivity options.

Introducing the concept of "wide" and "thin" nodes, the new systems will provide both commercial and scientific/technical customers with unequaled system flexibility.

"The processing power and architecture of the new systems reflect the changing nature of computing," Ben Barnes, assistant general manager, POWER Parallel Systems, told an audience at an IBM press briefing here. "As needs shift from the operational recording and reporting of information to the sophisticated and strategic analysis of data, we offer customers a parallel information system that can affordably solve an entirely new class of problems. The flexibility of these new POWERparallel machines will enable customers, for the first time, to design a system that can handle their changing needs -- by gathering, storing, managing, accessing, processing and analyzing large amounts of all types of data and images."

The ability to choose among system options gives both technical and commercial customers the power to design their computing environment exactly how they need it, and the flexibility to change it when necessary.

The POWERparallel System SP1 is widely popular in the scientific/technical market, and the new POWERparallel systems, with increased processing speed, improved internal communications via the High Performance Switch (HPS) and HPS adapter, and enhanced system management software, will continue to offer industry-leading performance to those customers with numerically-intensive computing requirements.

The new systems will also provide large data storage and I/O capacity and high bandwidth connectivity, and are well suited for commercial applications such as database query and decision support.

The POWERparallel systems are also the high end of the RISC System/6000 product line, and thus represent the high end of IBM's "palmtop to teraFLOPS" strategy. The systems run all of the 6,500+ existing RISC System/6000 applications and scores of parallel applications.

Readily Expands With New Technology

Demonstrating the flexibility of the POWERparallel family to expand with new technology, the new systems can co-exist with SP1 systems or current SP1 systems can easily be upgraded.

The new POWERparallel systems POWER2 processors will offer customers twice the processing power of the current system, eight times greater memory and four times greater bandwidth. The new systems grow to 128 nodes, doubling these system capabilities.

Customer Satisfaction

These new systems will be ideal for database query, decision support, business management, on-line transaction processing and batch business applications. They also will offer the highest compute performance, making them ideal for scientific/technical customers who want to scale to massively parallel computing performance -- up to hundreds of gigaFLOPS (billions of calculations per second).

Nearly Unlimited Connectivity

Customers will be able to connect to nearly every network they might have installed, empowering the POWERparallel system as an excellent server for client/server applications. Newly available Micro Channel adapters will include: ESCON*, Token Ring, HIPPI, High Performance Subsystem Adapter, and the SCSI-2 Fast/Wide Differential Adapter/A and Differential High Performance External I/O Controller, which offer broader connectivity and higher communication speeds.

IBM's High Performance Switch (HPS) and HPS Adapters will enable the new POWERparallel nodes to communicate with each other at exceptionally higher bandwidths (transmission capacity) and lower latencies (command response time).

Storage Systems

A wide range of storage devices from IBM's Storage Systems Division offers enormous storage capacity, high performance and high data availability for the POWERparallel systems. Included in the offerings are the 9333 High Performance Disk Drive Subsystem, the 7135 RAIDiant Array, the 9570 High Performance, High Capacity Disk Array Subsystem and the 3490 Enhanced Capability Magnetic Tape Subsystem, providing for up to 31 terabytes of storage.

Improved System Software, New Applications

With upgrades in system software for the current and new systems, customers will benefit from new functionality and enhanced system management, full versions of AIX/6000 running on each node, an integrated parallel development environment, full parallel job scheduling, a parallel file system and a set of tools to support parallel database implementations.

New applications include: IBM NetView/6000*, a network management tool, IBM Visual Data Explorer*, for 2D and 3D visualization of complex data, and IBM Optimization Subroutine Library (OSL) Parallel Support*, software for determining an optimal allocation of limited resources; INGRES Intelligent Database from the ASK Group, Inc.; SAP R/3, a client/server-based package of business applications software from SAP AG; and LS-DYNA-3D, a car crash simulation software from the Livermore Software Technology Corporation.

Twelve new software vendors have indicated that they intend to port their applications to run in parallel or parallel cluster mode on the POWERparallel system, bringing the number of software vendors to 63.

Real World Applications

Many businesses today have vast quantities of stored data as a result of their day-to-day business operations, including sales history and inventory data, and customer, supplier and product information. The new POWERparallel system will analyze this information to identify marketing trends and buying patterns, enabling companies to more effectively design marketing strategies.

In pursuit of better utilization of such data, Information Resources, Inc., a leading marketing research firm based in Chicago, is using a POWERparallel system at the Fermi National Accelerator Laboratory to discover the best way to access and analyze vast amounts of information.

"This research will not only benefit scientific users of high performance computers, but it will also benefit commercial users," said Thomas Nash, Associate Director for Scientific Technology and Laboratory Information at Fermilab. "In much the same way that Fermilab uses massively parallel computers like the IBM POWERparallel system to correlate the behavior of high energy physics particles -- such as quarks and leptons -- market analysis firms, for example, can correlate consumer buying habits -- such as how often shoppers purchase strawberry jelly when they buy peanut butter."

Scientific and technical customers use the POWERparallel system for such applications as seismic analysis, molecular modeling of drugs, computational fluid dynamics, plasma physics and other Grand Challenge problems.

Commercial customers will use the new system for a number of strategic functions including executive decision support; LAN consolidation; centralized management of distributed systems, quick-response "data mining" applications in financial investment research, banking, insurance and retail industries; complex business simulations, "just-in-time" warehousing; extensive digital libraries; and, massive multimedia and video-on-demand applications.

An increasingly popular use of the POWERparallel system for strategic data mining applications is fraud analysis, targeted at the insurance, banking and credit card industries, which analyses huge databases and can detect possible fraud through pattern recognition.

UniForum POWERparallel System Demonstrations

There are three POWERparallel systems present at UniForum, demonstrating commercial and scientific/technical applications. In the IBM booth (#1549), a system with two wide nodes and 12 thin nodes will be running parallel versions of IBM's relational database, DB2/6000*, and SAP R/3 applications from SAP AG, showing the scalability and server capabilities of the POWERparallel system.

A second POWERparallel system with 16 thin nodes is in Oracle Corporation's booth (#3033), demonstrating ORACLE7.1 Parallel Database software, a parallelized version of Oracle Corporation's popular database software.

An 8-node system is located in the UniForum Future Pavilion (#6321), which is showcasing technology considered to be an influence on the future direction of UNIX. Scalable, parallel machines running UNIX are in this category. The POWERparallel system will be running a seismic application on top of a parallel file system.

World-Class Systems

IBM's POWER Parallel Systems business unit [ http://ibm.tc.cornell.edu/ibm/pps/ibmpps.html ] produces world-class scalable, parallel information systems for commercial and scientific/technical customers.